March 16, 2022 • 39 mins
In December of 1988, 18 year old Londoner Raphael Rowe was living with 5 other men in social housing, when four violent robberies shocked Southeast England, leaving eight victims in their wake. One was killed and another was severely injured. The assailants' MO was to steal the victims' cars, ditch them at the next crime scene, and repeat the process. Twelve people in the area of the first abandoned cars were arrested, including Raphael and his friend Michael Davis. Contrary to the victims' descriptions of two white men with fair hair and blue eyes and one black man, several of those arrested helped police to shape a false narrative that instead pinned the crimes on three black men, Raphael, Michael, and a 3rd man, named Randolph Egbert Johnson. Police also planted evidence and coerced Raphael's main alibi witness to win the conviction. From inside his cell, Raphael enlisted the help of journalists and attorneys to investigate his claims of innocence, finally winning his freedom. Now, Raphael is a successful actor and journalist, but is still fighting to fully clear his name.
To learn more and get involved, visit:
https://raphaelrowefoundation.org/
https://raphael-rowe.com/second-chance
https://www.instagram.com/areporter/
https://lavaforgood.com/with-jason-flom/
Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Co No1.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
In December of four incidents in and outside of South London.
Two car thefs and two home invasions left eight victims
in their wake, one man severely injured, another brutally murdered,
and a number of cars and other good stolen. The
victims and witnesses all described three assailants, two white men
and one black man. The brutality of the crimes garnered
(00:24):
national attention, as well as mounting pressure to bring those
responsible to justice. It is believed that the first car
theF was traced to a hostel where eighteen year old
Raphael Rowe lived with five other men. On December nineteen,
he and his hostel mates, along with several others, were arrested.
Despite the prior identification of the perpetrators as two white
(00:44):
men and one black man and solid alibi witnesses, police
focused their investigation on Raphael and two other black men,
Michael Davis and Randolph Johnson. It became clear at trial
that the prosecution was relying on information from an incentivized
informant who was involved in the crimes. Discrepancies between the
victims and witnesses initial reports and their testimonies. A trial
(01:06):
race suspicion Despite all of that, plus Raphael and Michael's
alibi witnesses and the description of two white and one
black assailant, the jury convicted all three black men, and
Rafael was sentenced to life plus fifty years. During his incarceration,
Rathfael was able to develop evidence with the help of journalists,
to shed light on the details of his wrongful conviction,
(01:27):
including official misconduct and the fabrication of a false narrative.
Rafael joins us today to share his harrowing story and
his continued bite to clear his name. This is wrongful Conviction.
(01:52):
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today, we're taking you overseas
to Southeast England for a wrongful conviction case. That is,
it's a powerful story, not least of which because the
man who lived it has a way of telling it.
That is, it rocks my world. So I think this
is gonna be a wild episode and I'm really honored
(02:16):
to have with us today the man himself, Rafael Row Rafael,
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction. Thank you for inviting me on podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've never had the privilege of interviewing a wrongfully convicted
person who is themselves a podcaster journalists. But let's go
back all the way to even before this happened, right,
(02:38):
These are crimes that took place in December, a series
of robberies, violent robberies in Southeast England. It's like something
out of Clockwork, Orange or worse. And they're much more
than robberies. It was a murderer. There were other types
of home invasions and me, when I say robberies, it
sounds too benign to describe what was really going on here.
But what was your life like for all the sexacty happened? So?
(03:02):
I grew up in Southeast London in a very deprived neighborhood.
We had canceled houses, which are sort of social housing.
I come from a mixed race background. My father came
to the United Kingdom on the wind Rush as a
Jamaica and my mother is a born and bred Londoner
from West London. And when they got together they had
(03:23):
my three sisters and then along came me and my
dad was a laborer. My mom was a housewife bringing
up four kids, and so financially we struggled as a
young family, but we had quite a stable upbringing. Of course,
there were problems in our household. You know, my dad
liked to drink. My mom and dad would argue, but
on the street everybody was struggling and trying to make ends. Me.
(03:46):
Everybody came from a working class background and we all
grew up in small flats, in blocks of flats. You know.
I come from a neighborhood where riots had kicked off
in the United Kingdom because of the oppression of people
like myself, in particular black people in and around London,
especially migrants. To be honest, there was no one in
(04:06):
my life in my early teens that inspired me to
become anything. You know, everybody around me, we're just looking
to earn money, and for me, as a young teenager,
that was about being involved in petty crime. And so
by the age of eighteen, I got in trouble with
the law and I was put on what we call probation.
And at that point I went to live in a
(04:27):
hostel with one of my best friends. And in this
hostel in southeast London, there were lots of other sort
of wayward kids, if you like, people who have also
been sent there by the authorities for getting in trouble
with the law. And I was living with my best friend,
Michael Party in doing the things that you do as
a teenager without a care in the world. And so
(04:47):
that brings us to this insane series of events. Four
separate violent, hyper violent robberies that took place between December
thirteenth and December sixteenth. The first crime took place in
Sadly Here on December thirteenth, where two men stole a car,
a Triumph spitfire in the middle of the night and
took it back to Lori Park Road, which was the
hostel that you were living in that you just described now.
(05:10):
The next crime took place a few days later on
December sixteenth and Fickleshaw, where three masked men interrupted Peter
Herberg at a younger man named Alan Really as they
were having sex at a car. The masked men had
a knife and a gun. Really was pulled from the
car and robbed of ten pounds, and it was clear
that the three masked men intended to steal the car.
When Herberg objected, he was attacked, Really passed out, and
(05:33):
when he awoke he found that Herberg was dead after
having been savagely beaten. He had fractured ribs of bruce
heart and he had actually died from a heart attack,
obviously as a result of the beating. This car, by
the way, an Austin Princess was gone, but the stolen
car from the thirteenth, the Triumph Spitfire, was discovered abandon
close to the scene. The Austin Princess was then driven
(05:56):
to Oxted, which is about ten miles away, where the
three men invaded and robbed a home. There was a
violent struggle and one of the homes occupants was cut
badly with his artery severed. The house was ransacked and
the robbers left with the man's Toyota now here too.
The car from the previous robbery that night and Austin
Princess was found abandoned near the home. And in the
(06:18):
finalnce and an hour later, about twenty miles from Oxted,
in a place called Fetch Them, a couple woke up
in their bed to find three masked men in their room.
The robbers asked them for money, jewelry and car keys,
and the couple was tied and gagged while the robbers
ransacked the house. The men eventually left, driving off in
a Renault and a Vauxhall Cavalier. As before, the stolen
(06:38):
Toyota from the previous robbery was found nearby, and the
Renault and Voxhall were later found abandoned and burned out
in the field. So this is four separate incidents in
which eight people were robbed, one was severely injured, and
another one killed in a truly gro tesque manner. These
robberies hit the front pages of all the national news papers.
(07:00):
The headlines were things like two white men, one black
man commit horrors M twenty five gang, which is what
these three men were dubbed. Catch these monsters, bring back
hanging family. Wards for the arrest of these monsters, ETCETERA.
Tho pounds back then was a huge amount of money,
(07:22):
right we're talking about I don't know what that would
be in current dollars are with the exchange rate, but
I would say it's well over a hundred thousand dollars
in today's money. What I would say is that in
case after case, we see that these type of rewards,
which sound like a good idea on paper, lead to
people who want the money saying things that they might
(07:44):
otherwise know not to be true or guessing. So how
did they come to target you and the others? Well,
the facts don't materialize as to why we were initially
targeted until many years after I'd spent time in prison.
The reason the police targeted our address was because they
(08:05):
were given a tip off. I believe that there was
different evidence that led them to our address, i e.
The cars that had been discovered from the final robbery
that will burn out. Witnesses saw people standing over those
cars at the time and described those individuals to the police,
and I think the police then made some inroads on
who those people were. Two of those people were living
(08:26):
in the same address as me, two white guys. All
of the victims described the perpetrators as two white men
and one black man. One of the most significant factors
in this case, all of the victims of these crimes,
as terrified as they were, were able to give a
consistent account of what the perpetrators looked like, despite the
(08:47):
fact that these robbers were wearing balaklavas. And in case
anyone our eardience is unfamiliar with the term balaklava, it's
a scheme. Ask anyway, continue when the victims described the perpetrators,
having described one of the white men with blue eyes
and fair hair, another white man whose skin they saw
through the eyehole and the mouth of one of the
(09:10):
balaklavas was white and the black man, they said, had
brown skin with quite a hubby face. So that was
the level of detail. When I was arrested and my
co defendants were arrested, the three men that ended up
being charged were all black. I had dreadlocks at the time,
my code defendant had dreadlocks at the time, and the
(09:30):
other code defendant was of dark black African appearance. So
all three black men who were eventually charged didn't fit
the descriptions that were not only described by the victims,
but it was also repeated in these headlines that the
police were looking for two white men and one black man,
and that two white men were seen burning the cars
(09:51):
and etcetera, etcetera. The details were quite obvious. How could
the police go on to charge three black men, right?
These were no identifications that were given for a cross
the street or down the road, where you might say, well,
maybe they were mistaken about the race and it was
dark the street. They didn't work something like that. No,
these were up close and personal crimes, and there's no
(10:12):
way that everybody got the race of the perpetrators wrong.
You're absolutely right, Jason. These weren't fleeting glances across the
road in the dead of night. There was a level
of detail that you could not excuse. And this was
certainly a case as well where you would hope that
the authorities would be on their a game because everybody
needed these guys off the streets. I mean, whoever did
(10:34):
this are literally the people for whom prisons are built.
I totally agree with you, Jason. I think the problem
is is when the sensational headlines put politicians and lawmakers
the police under the extreme pressure that they then start
to target people that are innocent. They then home in
on people who are the most vulnerable, i e. Those
(10:54):
types of individuals like myself, who the public wouldn't care about.
This episode is underwritten by A i G, a leading
global insurance company. A i G is committed to corporate
(11:16):
social responsibility and is making a positive difference in the
lives of its employees and in the communities where we
work and live. In light of the compelling need for
pro bono legal assistance, and in recognition of A i
g s commitment to criminal and social justice reform, the
A i G Pro Bono Program provides free legal services
and other support to underrepresented communities and individuals. Twelve people
(11:47):
were arrested on the nineteenth of December under suspicion of
being involved in these crimes. I was one of them,
my co defendant Michael Davis, who was also my best
friend and lived with me in the hostel, as was
a number of other individuals who lived in at astle
Free In particular, three young white guys were also arrested,
(12:09):
as was a young Asian guy, but it was only me,
my co defendant, and the three white guys who remained
in the police station being interviewed and interrogated by the
police between the nine December and the twenty second of December,
when I was charged and then sent to a remand
prison to await trial. My friend Michael was reminded in custody.
(12:32):
The two white guys and the Asian guy were not
charged with the murder and the series of robberies, and
it was about three weeks later that Randolph Egbert Johnson,
who was involved in a high speed car chase with
the police, was arrested and he became the third suspect
in the so called m case. Randolph I didn't know him.
(12:55):
I had no association with him. I think i'd met
him once before, but we had no connection at all.
So tell me about the police interrogation. There were two
particular police officers who were responsible for my arres and
these two cops were typical of of your good cop,
bad cop type guys. One of them hated me from
the moment he set eyes on me. The other one
(13:17):
was slightly more reserved, always thought for and reflective of
my answers, and he always gave me some confidence that
he was believing me because I was not one of
those suspects who sat in the police cell saying no comment,
no comment, No. I took every opportunity to tell them
that I was not involved, that they were pointing the
finger at the wrong guy. I was providing them with
(13:39):
as much detail as I possibly could about where I was,
who I was with, what I was doing, and it
fell on deaf ears. And the reason for that is
because the other suspects that the police were interrogating him,
we're telling lies, were making stories up and I'd go
as far as to say they were con buying with
(14:00):
other police officers at the time to fabricate evidence that
would then be used against me. You know, even the
victims themselves, who I have all the sympathy for in
the world as to what they experience, even they started
to change their statements. So every time I told the
police where I was and what I was doing and
who I was with, they quickly got people to change
(14:23):
their statements or their time so that it would undermine
the evidence that proved unequivocally that I was innocent. And
you know why that is, Jason. During the interrogation, the
police have it in their head that they've got the
right people, the evidence that's coming into the interview room,
all these fabricated bits of evidence which were convincing the
(14:43):
police that they were onto the right guys, regardless of
the victims descriptions. The problem was is that by the
time they were starting to discover the real evidence I,
the evidence that proved I had an alibi, the evidence
that proved I could not have been involved in these crimes,
it was too late. So that's why they then went
back to witnesses and victims and started to get them
(15:05):
to change their statement. And that's easy for the police
to do when you believe in the police, and these
victims are law abiding citizens who lower by whatever the
police tell them they need to go by. You know,
I have to point out that in America, there's only
one state, which is Minnesota, where they record I was interrogations,
and I feel that's a reform that needs to be
(15:27):
instituted nationwide and worldwide, because most people understand the reason
why you need to record interrogations of suspects to make
sure they're not being beaten, coerced, fed information, etcetera, etcetera.
But in some cases, including this one, that would have
been extremely valuable to have access to the videotapes of
(15:47):
these incredibly suggestive witness identificatory procedures. I mean, they were
not even being suggested. They're being told you're wrong, don't
believe your eyes, believe us. And I should say now,
there was slutely no forensic evidence or any other kind
of scientific evidence in this case that pointed to me
(16:07):
or my code defendants. In fact, the opposite was true.
There was some forensic evidence i e. Fingerprints found on
the car at the scene of the murder that linked
the case to a white guy with blue eyes and
fair hair. I fitted the description as described by some
of the victims, and when the police discovered that and
(16:28):
I'm already locked up in prison charged with these crimes.
They went to this witness and they got this witness
to say that they stole the car that was used
in the robbery for me and my code defendants rather
than interrogate that individual about their involvement. It a tangled
freaking webman. This is this is a lot, and Raphael,
(16:50):
let's get to your alibi because you had multiple people
testifying to where you were during the crimes, right, please
take us through this. Initially, in the witness that survived statement,
the murder was time to take in place at eleven
thirty pm on the night of December. At that time,
(17:14):
me and my code defendant were with four girls who
we were knocking about with. I was sleeping with one
of those girls. And about ten thirty on the night
of the murder and these series of robberies, one of
the girls invited me and my friend and her mates
back to her parents house. So about ten thirty, the
girls and my code defendant went back to this other
(17:37):
girl's house. I met her mom for the first time,
I met her sister, and I met her sister's boyfriend,
who was a solicitor and we were there into about
half past midnight. All these witnesses very fy this, so
that's an hour after the murder had been committed, and
about half past twelve, the solicitor wanted to get rid
of this rowdy couple of guys who were smoking weed
(17:59):
and bouncing around with their dreadlocks. The solicitor offered to
give me and my friend a lift back to our flat,
and we agreed, and the solicitor drove me, my cody
friend and the girl I was sleeping with back to
my flat and we arrived back at about just twenty
two one in the morning. I went back to my
room with this girl. We smoked a joint and then
(18:20):
we made love. So I was in bed with her
until about one thirty in the morning, So this is
two hours after the murder had been committed. This was
just as the second robbery was taken place, and I'm
forty miles away from where these incidents were already taking place,
and this was my alibi. And all of these witnesses
(18:41):
I just mentioned came into the court at the time
of my trial and told the jury that I was
with them at this time, and this is why the
police got that first victim to change their statement. They
said that the crime didn't happen at eleven thirty, It
happened at twelve thirty. But even then I still had
(19:02):
an alibi that put me miles away from where this
crime was committed. But crucially, the girlfriend that I was
in bed with was then undermined by the police because
she gave the police items of jury that had come
from one of the robberies, saying that she got that
(19:24):
jury from me. That was an outright lie. And I
can tell you why. When I was in prison a
few months later, this girl wrote me a letter, unbeknown
that it would be crucial evidence, admitting that she'd lied
and that she had been put up by the police
to tell in the police that I had given her
(19:44):
items a jury in order to save herself from being
accused of perverting the course of justice or something like that.
So a I had a cast iron alibi, be the
police's attempt to undermine my alibi witnesses edibility by fabricating
evidence which she admitted was untrue. That's what we were
(20:05):
up against at the time of my trial. Yeah, they're
changing the times, they're changing the races of the perpetrators.
They're coercing or well threatening eye witnesses and alibi witnesses.
It's a whirlwind. So the trial itself, Raphael, it must
have been a circus atmosphere. If I'm going to guess,
please tell us about that experience. Here you are now
(20:28):
all of a sudden, I'm going to say, one of
the most hated men in the country, along with your
Code offense. The court setting was that the Old Bailey,
which is the number one call in the United Kingdom.
And yes, it was a circus. Me and my two
co defendants, all three of us stood in the dock
accused of the murder and the three robberies and the
attempted murder, and witness after witness, including the victims, who
(20:52):
stood up in the dock and gave evidence against us.
Some told the truth, many told lies. One of the
most awkward moments Jason, in the trial was when the
victims stood in the dock and they were asked to
describe the perpetrators, and that's when the ms and are
started to come in. You know. The victims were Yeah,
I did say that it was white skinned, and yes
(21:14):
I did say they had blue eyes, but maybe I
was wrong. Why was you wrong? But the police seemed
to believe that those men in the dock were guilty.
That was one of the saddest things for me that
the victims could look at the three guys that were
in the dock, know that we didn't commit the crime
and couldn't do anything about it, and yet somehow that
jury they went out and they came back and they
(21:37):
found us guilty. So yeah, in spite of the fact
that the victims are acknowledging their own original identifications of
these white, blonde, blue eyed individuals, and in spite of
the fact of your many alibi witnesses, in spite of
all of that, the jury goes out and finds you guilty.
So can you take us back to that moment when
(21:58):
the jury came in and they read the guilt t
verdict against me for murder, for attempted murder, and for
three serious robberies. The judge had no alternative but to
send me to prison for the rest of my life
plus fifty odd years, which is the accumulation of all
the sentences added up for the robberies. It's really difficult
(22:19):
to say at that point that I was crushed like
a peanut under my foot because I had already been
crushed when I was first charged with these offenses and
condemned to prison. I was crushed, And it was during
those eighteen months that I built a resilience within myself,
a determination not to allow them to get away with
(22:39):
what they were doing, not just to me and my family,
but also the victims and anybody else that was being
caught up wrongly. So by the time the jury came
in and found me guilty, as crushing as that was,
as desperate as I was a twenty one year old
destined to spend the rest of my life in prison
(23:00):
for a crime I didn't commit, I knew I was
not going to give up. I knew that they got
it wrong. They knew that they got it wrong, so
I was never ever going to allow this to sit
on that day forever. More. I think it was the
(23:27):
fact that I became so militant as a young twenty
one year old that I did everything I possibly could
to keep my body as fit as I possibly could
in order to withstand the four walls that I was
being confined in. So rather than sit in that cell,
I exercised in that cell, used it as my gym,
used it as my office, used it as the space
(23:50):
that I was gonna work my way out, whether that
was psychologically or physically. So I was studying the law,
teaching myself as much as I possibly could about the
law in order to understand how and why what had
happened to me happened to me. And I should stress
that in those years I was so militant. I did
(24:12):
not conform. I refused to work in prison every day.
As a convicted person, you are expected to follow the
regime of the maximum security prison. I you go to work,
you do the things the authorities expect you to do
as a guilty man. When I wasn't a guilty man,
so I was going to do everything in the opposite.
(24:33):
So when they opened my cell door and shouted my
name to go to work, I refused to leave the cell.
The consequence would mean that they would come into the
cell and physically dragged me out of the cell, take
me to the isolation block, where I would spend days
or weeks or months being punished for not being prepared
to put up with what guilty people had to endure.
(24:56):
And that went on for years. It was me against
the system, him as well as my wrongful conviction. And
I mean I I was brutalized so badly by the
authorities for not conforming. There were plenty of times where
they physically beat me or locked me in isolation cells
(25:16):
completely naked, for no other reason than they could. So Now,
from inside the confines of these barbaric prisons that you
were in, how did you manage to ultimately for yourself?
One of the big turning points for me, Jason was
the media, the publications of broadcast has paid a significant
(25:38):
role in my wrongful conviction by calling me and monster,
by asking for hanging to be brought back into the
United Kingdom to kill people like me who were guilty
of such horrible crimes. If the media could play such
a powerful role in my wrongful conviction, maybe they could
play a role in getting my conviction overturned. So I
embarked on a journalism correspondence course whilst I was in prison,
(26:03):
and that just meant paper push him in the same
way that I read every document, every line, every sentence
of every document that was involved in my case over
and over again for years, and I'd become very tuned
into how cases worked and didn't work. And I learned
so much teaching myself how journalists work. Meant I could
(26:26):
manipulate stories that I could send out there. So I'd
write letters to some of our national newspapers, the Guardian
and the Independent, son the Mirror, and they'd start slowly
but surely publish my letters or published little things that
I said. And then that triggered what happened next, which
was simply that the media who called me a monster,
(26:47):
where all of a sudden starting to question the safety
of my conviction, and they were showing interest in coming
to visit me. So I'd sit on a visiting table
and talk to these journalists about why was innocent and
asking them questions about what they remembered at the time,
and that just led to a lot of publicity question
(27:08):
in the safety of my conviction, and that rocked the
British criminal justice syst into its core. They really started
to wobble at the idea that they'd locked up three
innocent black men. And once the media started questioning the
safety of my conviction, once the media started to remind
(27:28):
the new generation of children that free black men were
imprisoned for crimes committed by two white men, we got
neared a lot of support, and that made a big
difference because it was then ten years into my wrongful
life imprisonment that barristers and reputable lawyer started to take
an interest when I wrote to them asking for their help,
(27:49):
and so they did start to help. And then there
was one moment where an eminent human rights lawyer discovered
that the non disclosure of the reward money meant that
I've been deprived the right of a fair trial, and
that particular lawyer took my case to the European Court
of Human Rights and it was an opportunity to set
(28:12):
out the fact that free black member in prison for
crimes committed by two white men one black man, I
had a cast iron aller by witness had given fabricated evidence,
reward money had been paid and it had not been disclosed.
So all this was laid out in front of twenty
nine judges at the European Court of Human Rights and
they unanimously in ruled that I had been denied the
(28:35):
right to a fair trial, and that that wrote the
British government and in two thousand the government told the
Court of Appeal they had to re hear my case
and it was just a few months after that my
convictions were overturned. You turned the train around on the tracks.
(28:55):
It's amazing that you were able to do it from
this dungeon that you were in, and even managed to
keep your wits about you. Your codefendants did they benefit
from your work as well? Were they reread when you were?
They were? Yes, my co defendants convictions were also overturned
(29:16):
at the Court of Appeal at the same time that
my convictions were overturned. And that happened on the seventeenth
of July two thousand and What was that moment like
walking out from the age of twenty and to the
age of thirty two. I was confined in a single
cell by myself. I suffered in those twelve years. And
(29:39):
it wasn't until they quashed my convictions. I walked down
the steps of the Court of Appeal. They opened up
the door, the door that was going to set me free,
that I for the first time cried. I fell into
the arms of my sister, one of my three sisters,
and it was the first time I cried in all
the years that I was in prison, and it felt
(30:01):
so good. And then I walked with my family to
the front of the Court of Appeal and shouted my
mouth off about how I'd lost so many years of
my life in prison to the world's media. The judges
cheekily and typically turned round and said, this is not
a declaration of innocence. But they quashed my conviction as
(30:23):
unsafe and they set me free. And that was the
big turning point. That's where my life began. That wasn't
the end of an ordeal. That was the beginning of
my life. That's beautiful, and you're inviolude so many things now, Raphael,
and it's it's awesome to see how you've taken the
world by the polls since you came home. So please
(30:44):
share with us what's your life like now. For me,
it was one of those kind of classical right place,
right time, right opportunity. From the age of twenty to
thirty two, I studied the law. In prison, I studied journalism.
So there was only two things I could do when
I got out of prison, and that was go down
that route of campaigning on behalf of other miscarriage of
justice victims. But I just spent twelve years of my
(31:05):
own fucking life fighting hard, and as much as I
do that in my own way. Now, the other option
was journalism, so that's what I did. I went. I
met a man who at the time was a senior
figure at the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. He offered
me an opportunity, and before I knew it, I was
working on the most prestigious radio program here in the
United Kingdom called the Radio for Today program, and I
(31:28):
remember sitting at the desk as a sort of call
center calling up politicians. Asked him to come on the program.
And after two or three days, I went into the
editor and I said, listen, you know what I've just
spent twelve you sitting on a cell bed or a
cell chair. I can't do this. This is not for me.
I need to be free. And he offered me the
opportunity to try my hand at being a reporter on
this prestigious program, and I accepted and I didn't look back.
(31:52):
I went on to become a reporter on this program. There.
You've got to remember, Jason and your audience. When I
came out of prison, I was handed a mobile home
for the first time. The Internet didn't exist when I
went to prison, so there were lots of technological developments.
So I was learning things on the job at the BBC,
and this was within twelve months of getting out, and
I worked my way through the BBC, working for the
(32:13):
Radio Pro then I worked for the prestigious BBC News program,
and then I worked for the longest running current affairs
investigative program Panorama as one of their correspondents. I spent
a lot of my early career as a BBC journalist
as an undercover operative because I knew how to duck
and dive. Having survived in prison, I had a gift
for the gap in that well. And so I spent
(32:34):
the next sixteen years, having been released from prison, carving
out this successful career as a BBC journalist as a
public speaker, as somebody who inspired other people from backgrounds
like mine, or bringing together people from my background and
the academic or the affluent background to show that we
could work together to bring about change in social justice.
(32:55):
And I left the BBC after sixteen seventeen years and
was given the opportunity by Netflix to do this series
called Inside the World's Toughest Prisons. And I thought they
were crazy to be asking me, having spent so long
trying to get the funk out of prisons to go
back in willingly. I thought long and hard and thought,
you know what, I can change people's perceptions about the
(33:18):
people that are in these places. I can change people's
perceptions about what prison is really like. You know, Let's
get rid of all this sensational violence stuff. Let's get
rid of all this kind of stigma around who these
individuals are, and let's try and understand more. And it's
been a phenomenal success. I go in prisons all around
the world, spent seven days with the prisoners to try
(33:40):
and find the balance between rehabilitation and punishment. In addition
to that, I have my own podcast, Second Chance. I
talked to people about why they give people a second chance,
what their second chances, what that means to people, not
just people that have come out of prison and gone
on to become entrepreneurs, or people that have been wrongly
(34:01):
convicted who have gone on to lead successful careers like
I have, but loads of different questions around what second
chance actually means. During the lockdown first pandemic, I wrote
my first book because so many people have asked me
about my life story, and although in bits and pieces
I've shared it, I've never put it all in one place.
(34:22):
So I wrote my autobiography, Notorious, which was published at
the end of last year. The most important thing for me,
the legacy of everything, is the Raphael Row Foundation, and
having experienced prisons around the globe, I realized so much
needs to be done, not just for the prisoners, but
the prisons to improve the humanity and the ability to
(34:45):
rehabilitate or give people a second chance. And that's why
I recently set up the Rafael Row Foundation in the
hope that my legacy will be to guard near people
change their perception about what prisons really are, what they mean,
and how they can help people rather than destroy people
or their families. It's great work and it uh it
(35:08):
speaks volumes about your character that you're giving back in
the ways that you best can, right. I mean, you
have a natural gift for this stuff, and you found
your I'm gonna call it your calling, and it's wonderful
to see you sort of thriving and you know, succeeding
I think, beyond any reasonable expectations that anybody could have
(35:28):
had and just making a difference. You know, what can
I say except you have all of my respect and
I'm just glad that you're here today, and of course
for anyone listening who wants to learn more about Rock
Fail's journey and follow it as I do, and as
I will his podcast, his book, The Rock Fail Row Foundation.
(35:49):
We're gonna have links to all of them in our bio.
And I'm sure people can follow you on Instagram, right
and what about other social media? Yeah, I'm on Instagram,
I'm on Twitter, I have a website. If you put
my name Raphael Row R O W E or a
reporter on Twitter or Instagram, you'll be able to find me.
And now we come to the closing of our show.
(36:10):
It's called closing arguments, and closing arguments works just like this.
I'm gonna kick back in my chair, turn my microphone
off and leave my headphones on, and of course leave
your mic open for you to share any final thoughts
you may have with our audience. I think for me,
one of the most important things is who am I?
(36:33):
Who am I? So I shared with you my upbringing,
I shared with you my ordeal of being wrongly convicted
and imprisoned. I've shared with you a bit about the
work that I do now having got out of prison.
You know when you think you hit the summit, you
never quite hit the summit because there's always more to climb.
And that's what I've done in my successful career as
(36:54):
a journalist. But I'm constantly asking myself the question who
am I? And that's what I want people to do,
ask themselves, who are you? Who am I? Am I
the person that wants to make lots of money? Am
I the person who wants to care for my elderly parents?
Am I the person who wants to become a high
performance athlete? I always ask myself the question who am I?
(37:17):
And I've reached what I think is a fair description
of myself. I am who I've always been. I'm the
same person that I was when I was a kid.
I'm the same person that I was when I was
in prison, and I'm definitely the same person now that
I'm free. And that person is an honest, direct with
(37:39):
morals and values where I believe not just in myself,
but in other people. And by other people, I mean
the good, the bad, and the elderly. Why shouldn't I
Why shouldn't you give up a few minutes of your
time or your space to see the other side of
of someone because I've shown over the years there are
(37:59):
different in sides to everybody. The person I am today,
as I say, is the same person I was when
I was a kid, when I was innocent, when I
just enjoyed the things that we all do before we're
corrupted by the things that we witness and here as
we get older, or our desires and our wants. So
that's my final word. Ask yourself, who are you? Because
(38:23):
I know who I am. Thank you for listening to
Ronful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall,
Justin Golden, Jeff Claver, and Kevin Wardis with research by
Lada Robinson. The music in this production was supplied by
three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to
(38:46):
follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at
Wrongful Conviction podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as
well as at Lava for Good. On all three platforms.
You can also follow me on both talk and Instagram
at its. Jason flam Raval Conviction is the production of
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number
(39:07):
one h
In December of four incidents in and outside of South London.
Two car thefs and two home invasions left eight victims
in their wake, one man severely injured, another brutally murdered,
and a number of cars and other good stolen. The
victims and witnesses all described three assailants, two white men
and one black man. The brutality of the crimes garnered
(00:24):
national attention, as well as mounting pressure to bring those
responsible to justice. It is believed that the first car
theF was traced to a hostel where eighteen year old
Raphael Rowe lived with five other men. On December nineteen,
he and his hostel mates, along with several others, were arrested.
Despite the prior identification of the perpetrators as two white
(00:44):
men and one black man and solid alibi witnesses, police
focused their investigation on Raphael and two other black men,
Michael Davis and Randolph Johnson. It became clear at trial
that the prosecution was relying on information from an incentivized
informant who was involved in the crimes. Discrepancies between the
victims and witnesses initial reports and their testimonies. A trial
(01:06):
race suspicion Despite all of that, plus Raphael and Michael's
alibi witnesses and the description of two white and one
black assailant, the jury convicted all three black men, and
Rafael was sentenced to life plus fifty years. During his incarceration,
Rathfael was able to develop evidence with the help of journalists,
to shed light on the details of his wrongful conviction,
(01:27):
including official misconduct and the fabrication of a false narrative.
Rafael joins us today to share his harrowing story and
his continued bite to clear his name. This is wrongful Conviction.
(01:52):
Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today, we're taking you overseas
to Southeast England for a wrongful conviction case. That is,
it's a powerful story, not least of which because the
man who lived it has a way of telling it.
That is, it rocks my world. So I think this
is gonna be a wild episode and I'm really honored
(02:16):
to have with us today the man himself, Rafael Row Rafael,
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction. Thank you for inviting me on podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've never had the privilege of interviewing a wrongfully convicted
person who is themselves a podcaster journalists. But let's go
back all the way to even before this happened, right,
(02:38):
These are crimes that took place in December, a series
of robberies, violent robberies in Southeast England. It's like something
out of Clockwork, Orange or worse. And they're much more
than robberies. It was a murderer. There were other types
of home invasions and me, when I say robberies, it
sounds too benign to describe what was really going on here.
But what was your life like for all the sexacty happened? So?
(03:02):
I grew up in Southeast London in a very deprived neighborhood.
We had canceled houses, which are sort of social housing.
I come from a mixed race background. My father came
to the United Kingdom on the wind Rush as a
Jamaica and my mother is a born and bred Londoner
from West London. And when they got together they had
(03:23):
my three sisters and then along came me and my
dad was a laborer. My mom was a housewife bringing
up four kids, and so financially we struggled as a
young family, but we had quite a stable upbringing. Of course,
there were problems in our household. You know, my dad
liked to drink. My mom and dad would argue, but
on the street everybody was struggling and trying to make ends. Me.
(03:46):
Everybody came from a working class background and we all
grew up in small flats, in blocks of flats. You know.
I come from a neighborhood where riots had kicked off
in the United Kingdom because of the oppression of people
like myself, in particular black people in and around London,
especially migrants. To be honest, there was no one in
(04:06):
my life in my early teens that inspired me to
become anything. You know, everybody around me, we're just looking
to earn money, and for me, as a young teenager,
that was about being involved in petty crime. And so
by the age of eighteen, I got in trouble with
the law and I was put on what we call probation.
And at that point I went to live in a
(04:27):
hostel with one of my best friends. And in this
hostel in southeast London, there were lots of other sort
of wayward kids, if you like, people who have also
been sent there by the authorities for getting in trouble
with the law. And I was living with my best friend,
Michael Party in doing the things that you do as
a teenager without a care in the world. And so
(04:47):
that brings us to this insane series of events. Four
separate violent, hyper violent robberies that took place between December
thirteenth and December sixteenth. The first crime took place in
Sadly Here on December thirteenth, where two men stole a car,
a Triumph spitfire in the middle of the night and
took it back to Lori Park Road, which was the
hostel that you were living in that you just described now.
(05:10):
The next crime took place a few days later on
December sixteenth and Fickleshaw, where three masked men interrupted Peter
Herberg at a younger man named Alan Really as they
were having sex at a car. The masked men had
a knife and a gun. Really was pulled from the
car and robbed of ten pounds, and it was clear
that the three masked men intended to steal the car.
When Herberg objected, he was attacked, Really passed out, and
(05:33):
when he awoke he found that Herberg was dead after
having been savagely beaten. He had fractured ribs of bruce
heart and he had actually died from a heart attack,
obviously as a result of the beating. This car, by
the way, an Austin Princess was gone, but the stolen
car from the thirteenth, the Triumph Spitfire, was discovered abandon
close to the scene. The Austin Princess was then driven
(05:56):
to Oxted, which is about ten miles away, where the
three men invaded and robbed a home. There was a
violent struggle and one of the homes occupants was cut
badly with his artery severed. The house was ransacked and
the robbers left with the man's Toyota now here too.
The car from the previous robbery that night and Austin
Princess was found abandoned near the home. And in the
(06:18):
finalnce and an hour later, about twenty miles from Oxted,
in a place called Fetch Them, a couple woke up
in their bed to find three masked men in their room.
The robbers asked them for money, jewelry and car keys,
and the couple was tied and gagged while the robbers
ransacked the house. The men eventually left, driving off in
a Renault and a Vauxhall Cavalier. As before, the stolen
(06:38):
Toyota from the previous robbery was found nearby, and the
Renault and Voxhall were later found abandoned and burned out
in the field. So this is four separate incidents in
which eight people were robbed, one was severely injured, and
another one killed in a truly gro tesque manner. These
robberies hit the front pages of all the national news papers.
(07:00):
The headlines were things like two white men, one black
man commit horrors M twenty five gang, which is what
these three men were dubbed. Catch these monsters, bring back
hanging family. Wards for the arrest of these monsters, ETCETERA.
Tho pounds back then was a huge amount of money,
(07:22):
right we're talking about I don't know what that would
be in current dollars are with the exchange rate, but
I would say it's well over a hundred thousand dollars
in today's money. What I would say is that in
case after case, we see that these type of rewards,
which sound like a good idea on paper, lead to
people who want the money saying things that they might
(07:44):
otherwise know not to be true or guessing. So how
did they come to target you and the others? Well,
the facts don't materialize as to why we were initially
targeted until many years after I'd spent time in prison.
The reason the police targeted our address was because they
(08:05):
were given a tip off. I believe that there was
different evidence that led them to our address, i e.
The cars that had been discovered from the final robbery
that will burn out. Witnesses saw people standing over those
cars at the time and described those individuals to the police,
and I think the police then made some inroads on
who those people were. Two of those people were living
(08:26):
in the same address as me, two white guys. All
of the victims described the perpetrators as two white men
and one black man. One of the most significant factors
in this case, all of the victims of these crimes,
as terrified as they were, were able to give a
consistent account of what the perpetrators looked like, despite the
(08:47):
fact that these robbers were wearing balaklavas. And in case
anyone our eardience is unfamiliar with the term balaklava, it's
a scheme. Ask anyway, continue when the victims described the perpetrators,
having described one of the white men with blue eyes
and fair hair, another white man whose skin they saw
through the eyehole and the mouth of one of the
(09:10):
balaklavas was white and the black man, they said, had
brown skin with quite a hubby face. So that was
the level of detail. When I was arrested and my
co defendants were arrested, the three men that ended up
being charged were all black. I had dreadlocks at the time,
my code defendant had dreadlocks at the time, and the
(09:30):
other code defendant was of dark black African appearance. So
all three black men who were eventually charged didn't fit
the descriptions that were not only described by the victims,
but it was also repeated in these headlines that the
police were looking for two white men and one black man,
and that two white men were seen burning the cars
(09:51):
and etcetera, etcetera. The details were quite obvious. How could
the police go on to charge three black men, right?
These were no identifications that were given for a cross
the street or down the road, where you might say, well,
maybe they were mistaken about the race and it was
dark the street. They didn't work something like that. No,
these were up close and personal crimes, and there's no
(10:12):
way that everybody got the race of the perpetrators wrong.
You're absolutely right, Jason. These weren't fleeting glances across the
road in the dead of night. There was a level
of detail that you could not excuse. And this was
certainly a case as well where you would hope that
the authorities would be on their a game because everybody
needed these guys off the streets. I mean, whoever did
(10:34):
this are literally the people for whom prisons are built.
I totally agree with you, Jason. I think the problem
is is when the sensational headlines put politicians and lawmakers
the police under the extreme pressure that they then start
to target people that are innocent. They then home in
on people who are the most vulnerable, i e. Those
(10:54):
types of individuals like myself, who the public wouldn't care about.
This episode is underwritten by A i G, a leading
global insurance company. A i G is committed to corporate
(11:16):
social responsibility and is making a positive difference in the
lives of its employees and in the communities where we
work and live. In light of the compelling need for
pro bono legal assistance, and in recognition of A i
g s commitment to criminal and social justice reform, the
A i G Pro Bono Program provides free legal services
and other support to underrepresented communities and individuals. Twelve people
(11:47):
were arrested on the nineteenth of December under suspicion of
being involved in these crimes. I was one of them,
my co defendant Michael Davis, who was also my best
friend and lived with me in the hostel, as was
a number of other individuals who lived in at astle
Free In particular, three young white guys were also arrested,
(12:09):
as was a young Asian guy, but it was only me,
my co defendant, and the three white guys who remained
in the police station being interviewed and interrogated by the
police between the nine December and the twenty second of December,
when I was charged and then sent to a remand
prison to await trial. My friend Michael was reminded in custody.
(12:32):
The two white guys and the Asian guy were not
charged with the murder and the series of robberies, and
it was about three weeks later that Randolph Egbert Johnson,
who was involved in a high speed car chase with
the police, was arrested and he became the third suspect
in the so called m case. Randolph I didn't know him.
(12:55):
I had no association with him. I think i'd met
him once before, but we had no connection at all.
So tell me about the police interrogation. There were two
particular police officers who were responsible for my arres and
these two cops were typical of of your good cop,
bad cop type guys. One of them hated me from
the moment he set eyes on me. The other one
(13:17):
was slightly more reserved, always thought for and reflective of
my answers, and he always gave me some confidence that
he was believing me because I was not one of
those suspects who sat in the police cell saying no comment,
no comment, No. I took every opportunity to tell them
that I was not involved, that they were pointing the
finger at the wrong guy. I was providing them with
(13:39):
as much detail as I possibly could about where I was,
who I was with, what I was doing, and it
fell on deaf ears. And the reason for that is
because the other suspects that the police were interrogating him,
we're telling lies, were making stories up and I'd go
as far as to say they were con buying with
(14:00):
other police officers at the time to fabricate evidence that
would then be used against me. You know, even the
victims themselves, who I have all the sympathy for in
the world as to what they experience, even they started
to change their statements. So every time I told the
police where I was and what I was doing and
who I was with, they quickly got people to change
(14:23):
their statements or their time so that it would undermine
the evidence that proved unequivocally that I was innocent. And
you know why that is, Jason. During the interrogation, the
police have it in their head that they've got the
right people, the evidence that's coming into the interview room,
all these fabricated bits of evidence which were convincing the
(14:43):
police that they were onto the right guys, regardless of
the victims descriptions. The problem was is that by the
time they were starting to discover the real evidence I,
the evidence that proved I had an alibi, the evidence
that proved I could not have been involved in these crimes,
it was too late. So that's why they then went
back to witnesses and victims and started to get them
(15:05):
to change their statement. And that's easy for the police
to do when you believe in the police, and these
victims are law abiding citizens who lower by whatever the
police tell them they need to go by. You know,
I have to point out that in America, there's only
one state, which is Minnesota, where they record I was interrogations,
and I feel that's a reform that needs to be
(15:27):
instituted nationwide and worldwide, because most people understand the reason
why you need to record interrogations of suspects to make
sure they're not being beaten, coerced, fed information, etcetera, etcetera.
But in some cases, including this one, that would have
been extremely valuable to have access to the videotapes of
(15:47):
these incredibly suggestive witness identificatory procedures. I mean, they were
not even being suggested. They're being told you're wrong, don't
believe your eyes, believe us. And I should say now,
there was slutely no forensic evidence or any other kind
of scientific evidence in this case that pointed to me
(16:07):
or my code defendants. In fact, the opposite was true.
There was some forensic evidence i e. Fingerprints found on
the car at the scene of the murder that linked
the case to a white guy with blue eyes and
fair hair. I fitted the description as described by some
of the victims, and when the police discovered that and
(16:28):
I'm already locked up in prison charged with these crimes.
They went to this witness and they got this witness
to say that they stole the car that was used
in the robbery for me and my code defendants rather
than interrogate that individual about their involvement. It a tangled
freaking webman. This is this is a lot, and Raphael,
(16:50):
let's get to your alibi because you had multiple people
testifying to where you were during the crimes, right, please
take us through this. Initially, in the witness that survived statement,
the murder was time to take in place at eleven
thirty pm on the night of December. At that time,
(17:14):
me and my code defendant were with four girls who
we were knocking about with. I was sleeping with one
of those girls. And about ten thirty on the night
of the murder and these series of robberies, one of
the girls invited me and my friend and her mates
back to her parents house. So about ten thirty, the
girls and my code defendant went back to this other
(17:37):
girl's house. I met her mom for the first time,
I met her sister, and I met her sister's boyfriend,
who was a solicitor and we were there into about
half past midnight. All these witnesses very fy this, so
that's an hour after the murder had been committed, and
about half past twelve, the solicitor wanted to get rid
of this rowdy couple of guys who were smoking weed
(17:59):
and bouncing around with their dreadlocks. The solicitor offered to
give me and my friend a lift back to our flat,
and we agreed, and the solicitor drove me, my cody
friend and the girl I was sleeping with back to
my flat and we arrived back at about just twenty
two one in the morning. I went back to my
room with this girl. We smoked a joint and then
(18:20):
we made love. So I was in bed with her
until about one thirty in the morning, So this is
two hours after the murder had been committed. This was
just as the second robbery was taken place, and I'm
forty miles away from where these incidents were already taking place,
and this was my alibi. And all of these witnesses
(18:41):
I just mentioned came into the court at the time
of my trial and told the jury that I was
with them at this time, and this is why the
police got that first victim to change their statement. They
said that the crime didn't happen at eleven thirty, It
happened at twelve thirty. But even then I still had
(19:02):
an alibi that put me miles away from where this
crime was committed. But crucially, the girlfriend that I was
in bed with was then undermined by the police because
she gave the police items of jury that had come
from one of the robberies, saying that she got that
(19:24):
jury from me. That was an outright lie. And I
can tell you why. When I was in prison a
few months later, this girl wrote me a letter, unbeknown
that it would be crucial evidence, admitting that she'd lied
and that she had been put up by the police
to tell in the police that I had given her
(19:44):
items a jury in order to save herself from being
accused of perverting the course of justice or something like that.
So a I had a cast iron alibi, be the
police's attempt to undermine my alibi witnesses edibility by fabricating
evidence which she admitted was untrue. That's what we were
(20:05):
up against at the time of my trial. Yeah, they're
changing the times, they're changing the races of the perpetrators.
They're coercing or well threatening eye witnesses and alibi witnesses.
It's a whirlwind. So the trial itself, Raphael, it must
have been a circus atmosphere. If I'm going to guess,
please tell us about that experience. Here you are now
(20:28):
all of a sudden, I'm going to say, one of
the most hated men in the country, along with your
Code offense. The court setting was that the Old Bailey,
which is the number one call in the United Kingdom.
And yes, it was a circus. Me and my two
co defendants, all three of us stood in the dock
accused of the murder and the three robberies and the
attempted murder, and witness after witness, including the victims, who
(20:52):
stood up in the dock and gave evidence against us.
Some told the truth, many told lies. One of the
most awkward moments Jason, in the trial was when the
victims stood in the dock and they were asked to
describe the perpetrators, and that's when the ms and are
started to come in. You know. The victims were Yeah,
I did say that it was white skinned, and yes
(21:14):
I did say they had blue eyes, but maybe I
was wrong. Why was you wrong? But the police seemed
to believe that those men in the dock were guilty.
That was one of the saddest things for me that
the victims could look at the three guys that were
in the dock, know that we didn't commit the crime
and couldn't do anything about it, and yet somehow that
jury they went out and they came back and they
(21:37):
found us guilty. So yeah, in spite of the fact
that the victims are acknowledging their own original identifications of
these white, blonde, blue eyed individuals, and in spite of
the fact of your many alibi witnesses, in spite of
all of that, the jury goes out and finds you guilty.
So can you take us back to that moment when
(21:58):
the jury came in and they read the guilt t
verdict against me for murder, for attempted murder, and for
three serious robberies. The judge had no alternative but to
send me to prison for the rest of my life
plus fifty odd years, which is the accumulation of all
the sentences added up for the robberies. It's really difficult
(22:19):
to say at that point that I was crushed like
a peanut under my foot because I had already been
crushed when I was first charged with these offenses and
condemned to prison. I was crushed, And it was during
those eighteen months that I built a resilience within myself,
a determination not to allow them to get away with
(22:39):
what they were doing, not just to me and my family,
but also the victims and anybody else that was being
caught up wrongly. So by the time the jury came
in and found me guilty, as crushing as that was,
as desperate as I was a twenty one year old
destined to spend the rest of my life in prison
(23:00):
for a crime I didn't commit, I knew I was
not going to give up. I knew that they got
it wrong. They knew that they got it wrong, so
I was never ever going to allow this to sit
on that day forever. More. I think it was the
(23:27):
fact that I became so militant as a young twenty
one year old that I did everything I possibly could
to keep my body as fit as I possibly could
in order to withstand the four walls that I was
being confined in. So rather than sit in that cell,
I exercised in that cell, used it as my gym,
used it as my office, used it as the space
(23:50):
that I was gonna work my way out, whether that
was psychologically or physically. So I was studying the law,
teaching myself as much as I possibly could about the
law in order to understand how and why what had
happened to me happened to me. And I should stress
that in those years I was so militant. I did
(24:12):
not conform. I refused to work in prison every day.
As a convicted person, you are expected to follow the
regime of the maximum security prison. I you go to work,
you do the things the authorities expect you to do
as a guilty man. When I wasn't a guilty man,
so I was going to do everything in the opposite.
(24:33):
So when they opened my cell door and shouted my
name to go to work, I refused to leave the cell.
The consequence would mean that they would come into the
cell and physically dragged me out of the cell, take
me to the isolation block, where I would spend days
or weeks or months being punished for not being prepared
to put up with what guilty people had to endure.
(24:56):
And that went on for years. It was me against
the system, him as well as my wrongful conviction. And
I mean I I was brutalized so badly by the
authorities for not conforming. There were plenty of times where
they physically beat me or locked me in isolation cells
(25:16):
completely naked, for no other reason than they could. So Now,
from inside the confines of these barbaric prisons that you
were in, how did you manage to ultimately for yourself?
One of the big turning points for me, Jason was
the media, the publications of broadcast has paid a significant
(25:38):
role in my wrongful conviction by calling me and monster,
by asking for hanging to be brought back into the
United Kingdom to kill people like me who were guilty
of such horrible crimes. If the media could play such
a powerful role in my wrongful conviction, maybe they could
play a role in getting my conviction overturned. So I
embarked on a journalism correspondence course whilst I was in prison,
(26:03):
and that just meant paper push him in the same
way that I read every document, every line, every sentence
of every document that was involved in my case over
and over again for years, and I'd become very tuned
into how cases worked and didn't work. And I learned
so much teaching myself how journalists work. Meant I could
(26:26):
manipulate stories that I could send out there. So I'd
write letters to some of our national newspapers, the Guardian
and the Independent, son the Mirror, and they'd start slowly
but surely publish my letters or published little things that
I said. And then that triggered what happened next, which
was simply that the media who called me a monster,
(26:47):
where all of a sudden starting to question the safety
of my conviction, and they were showing interest in coming
to visit me. So I'd sit on a visiting table
and talk to these journalists about why was innocent and
asking them questions about what they remembered at the time,
and that just led to a lot of publicity question
(27:08):
in the safety of my conviction, and that rocked the
British criminal justice syst into its core. They really started
to wobble at the idea that they'd locked up three
innocent black men. And once the media started questioning the
safety of my conviction, once the media started to remind
(27:28):
the new generation of children that free black men were
imprisoned for crimes committed by two white men, we got
neared a lot of support, and that made a big
difference because it was then ten years into my wrongful
life imprisonment that barristers and reputable lawyer started to take
an interest when I wrote to them asking for their help,
(27:49):
and so they did start to help. And then there
was one moment where an eminent human rights lawyer discovered
that the non disclosure of the reward money meant that
I've been deprived the right of a fair trial, and
that particular lawyer took my case to the European Court
of Human Rights and it was an opportunity to set
(28:12):
out the fact that free black member in prison for
crimes committed by two white men one black man, I
had a cast iron aller by witness had given fabricated evidence,
reward money had been paid and it had not been disclosed.
So all this was laid out in front of twenty
nine judges at the European Court of Human Rights and
they unanimously in ruled that I had been denied the
(28:35):
right to a fair trial, and that that wrote the
British government and in two thousand the government told the
Court of Appeal they had to re hear my case
and it was just a few months after that my
convictions were overturned. You turned the train around on the tracks.
(28:55):
It's amazing that you were able to do it from
this dungeon that you were in, and even managed to
keep your wits about you. Your codefendants did they benefit
from your work as well? Were they reread when you were?
They were? Yes, my co defendants convictions were also overturned
(29:16):
at the Court of Appeal at the same time that
my convictions were overturned. And that happened on the seventeenth
of July two thousand and What was that moment like
walking out from the age of twenty and to the
age of thirty two. I was confined in a single
cell by myself. I suffered in those twelve years. And
(29:39):
it wasn't until they quashed my convictions. I walked down
the steps of the Court of Appeal. They opened up
the door, the door that was going to set me free,
that I for the first time cried. I fell into
the arms of my sister, one of my three sisters,
and it was the first time I cried in all
the years that I was in prison, and it felt
(30:01):
so good. And then I walked with my family to
the front of the Court of Appeal and shouted my
mouth off about how I'd lost so many years of
my life in prison to the world's media. The judges
cheekily and typically turned round and said, this is not
a declaration of innocence. But they quashed my conviction as
(30:23):
unsafe and they set me free. And that was the
big turning point. That's where my life began. That wasn't
the end of an ordeal. That was the beginning of
my life. That's beautiful, and you're inviolude so many things now, Raphael,
and it's it's awesome to see how you've taken the
world by the polls since you came home. So please
(30:44):
share with us what's your life like now. For me,
it was one of those kind of classical right place,
right time, right opportunity. From the age of twenty to
thirty two, I studied the law. In prison, I studied journalism.
So there was only two things I could do when
I got out of prison, and that was go down
that route of campaigning on behalf of other miscarriage of
justice victims. But I just spent twelve years of my
(31:05):
own fucking life fighting hard, and as much as I
do that in my own way. Now, the other option
was journalism, so that's what I did. I went. I
met a man who at the time was a senior
figure at the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. He offered
me an opportunity, and before I knew it, I was
working on the most prestigious radio program here in the
United Kingdom called the Radio for Today program, and I
(31:28):
remember sitting at the desk as a sort of call
center calling up politicians. Asked him to come on the program.
And after two or three days, I went into the
editor and I said, listen, you know what I've just
spent twelve you sitting on a cell bed or a
cell chair. I can't do this. This is not for me.
I need to be free. And he offered me the
opportunity to try my hand at being a reporter on
this prestigious program, and I accepted and I didn't look back.
(31:52):
I went on to become a reporter on this program. There.
You've got to remember, Jason and your audience. When I
came out of prison, I was handed a mobile home
for the first time. The Internet didn't exist when I
went to prison, so there were lots of technological developments.
So I was learning things on the job at the BBC,
and this was within twelve months of getting out, and
I worked my way through the BBC, working for the
(32:13):
Radio Pro then I worked for the prestigious BBC News program,
and then I worked for the longest running current affairs
investigative program Panorama as one of their correspondents. I spent
a lot of my early career as a BBC journalist
as an undercover operative because I knew how to duck
and dive. Having survived in prison, I had a gift
for the gap in that well. And so I spent
(32:34):
the next sixteen years, having been released from prison, carving
out this successful career as a BBC journalist as a
public speaker, as somebody who inspired other people from backgrounds
like mine, or bringing together people from my background and
the academic or the affluent background to show that we
could work together to bring about change in social justice.
(32:55):
And I left the BBC after sixteen seventeen years and
was given the opportunity by Netflix to do this series
called Inside the World's Toughest Prisons. And I thought they
were crazy to be asking me, having spent so long
trying to get the funk out of prisons to go
back in willingly. I thought long and hard and thought,
you know what, I can change people's perceptions about the
(33:18):
people that are in these places. I can change people's
perceptions about what prison is really like. You know, Let's
get rid of all this sensational violence stuff. Let's get
rid of all this kind of stigma around who these
individuals are, and let's try and understand more. And it's
been a phenomenal success. I go in prisons all around
the world, spent seven days with the prisoners to try
(33:40):
and find the balance between rehabilitation and punishment. In addition
to that, I have my own podcast, Second Chance. I
talked to people about why they give people a second chance,
what their second chances, what that means to people, not
just people that have come out of prison and gone
on to become entrepreneurs, or people that have been wrongly
(34:01):
convicted who have gone on to lead successful careers like
I have, but loads of different questions around what second
chance actually means. During the lockdown first pandemic, I wrote
my first book because so many people have asked me
about my life story, and although in bits and pieces
I've shared it, I've never put it all in one place.
(34:22):
So I wrote my autobiography, Notorious, which was published at
the end of last year. The most important thing for me,
the legacy of everything, is the Raphael Row Foundation, and
having experienced prisons around the globe, I realized so much
needs to be done, not just for the prisoners, but
the prisons to improve the humanity and the ability to
(34:45):
rehabilitate or give people a second chance. And that's why
I recently set up the Rafael Row Foundation in the
hope that my legacy will be to guard near people
change their perception about what prisons really are, what they mean,
and how they can help people rather than destroy people
or their families. It's great work and it uh it
(35:08):
speaks volumes about your character that you're giving back in
the ways that you best can, right. I mean, you
have a natural gift for this stuff, and you found
your I'm gonna call it your calling, and it's wonderful
to see you sort of thriving and you know, succeeding
I think, beyond any reasonable expectations that anybody could have
(35:28):
had and just making a difference. You know, what can
I say except you have all of my respect and
I'm just glad that you're here today, and of course
for anyone listening who wants to learn more about Rock
Fail's journey and follow it as I do, and as
I will his podcast, his book, The Rock Fail Row Foundation.
(35:49):
We're gonna have links to all of them in our bio.
And I'm sure people can follow you on Instagram, right
and what about other social media? Yeah, I'm on Instagram,
I'm on Twitter, I have a website. If you put
my name Raphael Row R O W E or a
reporter on Twitter or Instagram, you'll be able to find me.
And now we come to the closing of our show.
(36:10):
It's called closing arguments, and closing arguments works just like this.
I'm gonna kick back in my chair, turn my microphone
off and leave my headphones on, and of course leave
your mic open for you to share any final thoughts
you may have with our audience. I think for me,
one of the most important things is who am I?
(36:33):
Who am I? So I shared with you my upbringing,
I shared with you my ordeal of being wrongly convicted
and imprisoned. I've shared with you a bit about the
work that I do now having got out of prison.
You know when you think you hit the summit, you
never quite hit the summit because there's always more to climb.
And that's what I've done in my successful career as
(36:54):
a journalist. But I'm constantly asking myself the question who
am I? And that's what I want people to do,
ask themselves, who are you? Who am I? Am I
the person that wants to make lots of money? Am
I the person who wants to care for my elderly parents?
Am I the person who wants to become a high
performance athlete? I always ask myself the question who am I?
(37:17):
And I've reached what I think is a fair description
of myself. I am who I've always been. I'm the
same person that I was when I was a kid.
I'm the same person that I was when I was
in prison, and I'm definitely the same person now that
I'm free. And that person is an honest, direct with
(37:39):
morals and values where I believe not just in myself,
but in other people. And by other people, I mean
the good, the bad, and the elderly. Why shouldn't I
Why shouldn't you give up a few minutes of your
time or your space to see the other side of
of someone because I've shown over the years there are
(37:59):
different in sides to everybody. The person I am today,
as I say, is the same person I was when
I was a kid, when I was innocent, when I
just enjoyed the things that we all do before we're
corrupted by the things that we witness and here as
we get older, or our desires and our wants. So
that's my final word. Ask yourself, who are you? Because
(38:23):
I know who I am. Thank you for listening to
Ronful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall,
Justin Golden, Jeff Claver, and Kevin Wardis with research by
Lada Robinson. The music in this production was supplied by
three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to
(38:46):
follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at
Wrongful Conviction podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as
well as at Lava for Good. On all three platforms.
You can also follow me on both talk and Instagram
at its. Jason flam Raval Conviction is the production of
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number
(39:07):
one h
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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